Jimmy Kimmel and Those Consummate Celebrity Hypocrites

“A fondness for power is implanted, in most men, and it is natural to abuse it, when acquired.” —Alexander Hamilton (1775)

It would not be accurate to say that all celebrities are narcissists. Nor that all of them are eventually seduced by their fame and fortune to believe, because they’ve made a lot of money in the business of pretense, or by throwing balls or by telling jokes, that somehow their opinion on everything else matters. But the fact is, many people are compelled into celebrity fame by varying degrees of Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

That would include a lot of celebrity politicians, most notably Barack Obama, who should have a shelf full of Oscars for his eight-year acting role as “president” — along with his Nobel Appeasement Prize. Having endured a few episodes of the Democrat administration of Frank Underwood in the fictional series “House of Cards,” I can tell you that the primary difference between that farce and Obama’s administration is that actor Kevin Spacey has better scriptwriters.

The same pathological egocentrism that propelled Obama’s meteoric celebrity is epidemic in the “entertainment” industry.

Since Donald Trump announced his presidential aspirations in 2015, the collective entertainment collusion brain trust, with a few brave exceptions, has plunged into an abyss of hacking political hyperbole. While the Demo/MSM talkingheads have always been dependable propagandists for the Left, another media sector, the late-night TV and cable chattering class, has become regressively more “political,” perfecting the model of entertainment as indoctrination in order to advance the Left’s agenda.

Ten years ago, when I first wrote about how entertainment is an unfiltered portal for indoctrination, I noted: “Entertainment is the subtlest and most effective means of ideological indoctrinating. It creates a psychological opening through which political and cultural messages bypass the intellectual filters that arrest most input for critical analysis. Because the context for these messages is ‘entertainment,’ they get a free pass into the mind’s cultural framework, where they compete, at a subconscious level, with established ethical and moral standards.”

Those at greatest risk for this form of indoctrination are emotive adults, who are not constantly vigilant about screening ethical and moral messages from mass media, theater, music, books, magazines, infotainment programs, etc., and who are, thus, not deliberate about evaluating those messages. They are at risk of having these messages not only encroach upon but, over time, displace their intellectual source code for wholesome values and good sense.

One notable case study of a late-night entertainer — one the Left has anointed “the moral conscience of America” — is ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel. He is competing with CBS’s Stephen Colbert, who currently ranks at the top of the diminishing late-night viewer market, to see who can inject the most toxic leftist rhetoric into their monologue. Apparently, such boorish political orotundity sells in the adolescent market hours. As National Review’s Rich Lowry notes, “[NBC’s] Jimmy Fallon … has pointedly declined to make his show the New York Times editorial page with a few jokes attached, and has seen a ratings decline.”

But before illuminating Kimmel’s hypocrisy, most notably his gross objectification of women, let’s pause for a minute to consider the leftist contortions over another Hollywood hypocrite (redundant, I know), Harvey Weinstein.

As you know by now, Weinstein, one of the most powerful entertainment industry moguls, has a long history as a serial sexual predator, one of many decades-old celebrity “secrets in plain sight.” Of course, nobody who wanted to get ahead in Tinseltown dared say anything about his creepy and criminal behavior. And the Leftmedia, most notably NBC, has long suppressed reports about Weinstein.

And numerous morally superior leftist politicos, who wanted to keep his graft flowing into their political coffers, also kept quiet. Most notably, Hillary Clinton seemed to enter a witness protection program for six days after the Weinstein allegations became public, most likely to deflect reports about all the cash she received from Weinstein. Or was it to avoid the inevitable comparisons with her depraved husband? She insisted that Weinstein was a bad boy, but added: “After all, we have someone admitting to being a sexual assaulter in the Oval Office.” Why, it’s almost as if she isn’t married to a serial sexual assailant…

The “revelations” about Weinstein exposed the gross underbelly of Hollywood’s silence on the sexual predators in its own ranks, which brings me back to Jimmy Christian Kimmel (seriously, that’s his middle name).

Increasingly, Kimmel has used his late-night platform as a soapbox for political rhetoric, mostly to parrot talking points from Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY). His most recent foray into policy was October 2nd, after the deadly attack in Las Vegas, when he used his monologue for an impassioned plea to solve the nation’s “gun problem.”

Kimmel’s crusade was surreal, almost as if he doesn’t realize that no one glorifies “gun violence” more than his entertainment industry. In fact, the same night Kimmel pontificated about gun control, insisting “[Republicans] should be praying for God to forgive them for letting the gun lobby run this country,” his guest was Anthony Anderson, who made his name in, among other things, Martin Scorsese’s extraordinarily violent film “The Departed.”

You’d be hard pressed to find any episode of Kimmel that doesn’t feature a celebrity guest who has made a fortune on big-screen violence.

Being roundly criticized for his celebrity sock-puppet rhetoric about guns and violence, Kimmel squared off with his conservative critics, asserting this week, “I probably wouldn’t want to have a conversation with them anyway. … Not good riddance, but riddance.”

Not surprisingly, Kimmel has been noticeably silent about Weinstein’s Tinseltown troubles, which have otherwise dominated the airwaves in the last week. He explained his lack of commentary, saying, “Harvey Weinstein is not a friend of mine, and I’ll add that that story came out moments before we went to tape on Thursday, and we didn’t have a show on Friday.”

However, the following Monday, Kimmel did serve up a joke about Weinstein, because as all of Kimmel’s kin were ducking and covering, he decided rape and sexual assault were funny: “What’s the difference between Harvey Weinstein and the Pillsbury Doughboy? When the Pillsbury Doughboy offers you a roll, he doesn’t ask you to watch him take a shower for it.”

But Kimmel and those who profit from his success are hiding a hypocritical secret in plain sight — one that explains his silence on Weinstein.

Kimmel’s launch pad to fame was a series he co-hosted with Adam Carolla, “The Man Show,” which was based on the objectification of women, or “juggies” as he referred to them. This was not the promotion of what contemporary leftists call “sexist micro-aggressions.” Instead, it was the unmitigated and often grotesque portrayal of women as nothing more than sexual objects — but all in good humor.

Typical of Kimmel’s crude episodes was a street skit where he asked women to “guess what’s in my pants,” a skit in which he asked them to grope his groin.

Early in the series, Kimmel explains, “So help us God, every episode of ‘The Man Show’ will end with girls jumping on trampolines!” And indeed, every episode did end with women in bikinis jumping on trampolines to the cheers of his audience.

To which Corolla said, “A dam to hold back the tidal wave of feminization that is flooding this country.”

To which Kimmel replied, “A dam to stop the river of estrogen that is drowning us in political correctness.”

So, given all the Hollywood hand-wringing about the sexist objectification of women, how is it that ABC can justify paying Kimmel, a serial sexist, $10 million a year as the host of its late-night centerpiece? They need to say, “Not good riddance, but riddance, Jimmy!”

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